I'm working on a SceneKit game using Swift, and I'm thinking about the best way to organize the various screens/ states surrounding the actual main game scene. I have a simple prototype which consists of three states:
Splash Screen (choose game type) ->
Game ->
Game over screen (choose to play again or return to splash)
In the prototype I opted to go for UIKit to do the UI elements, rather than a SpriteKit overlay. Although it's just buttons at the moment, which would be easy enough to do in SpriteKit, I might in future want to add sliders (eg an options screen to set control sensitivity etc), text entry etc, and then you end up recreating great chunks of uikit.
So at present, each of the 3 scenes described above has its own UIViewController. The Splash and Game ViewControllers have their own SCNViews and SCNScenes, and the GameOver is a modal that displays over the main Game scene.
This structure isn't really ideal, as it means that the main game SCNScene gets reloaded whenever the viewDidLoad of the GameViewController fires. The main SCNScene is quite detailed so takes a few seconds to load, and with repeated cycles this seems to create memory issues. After 2 cycles of Splash -> Game -> GameOver I get a memory warning, and after the third cycle Xcode loses the connection to the iPhone (which seems, in my experience, to be caused by memory issues).
I would like to have a main GameViewController that loads the most frequently reused assets once, but still be able to segue between the various menu screens.
So what are the options here?
I thought perhaps I could have a main GameViewController which controls the loading and unloading of SceneKit assets and has the sole SCNView. Its viewDidLoad method would only be fired once, when the app first starts. Then, each of the other views would have a very minimal UIViewController, which would be presented as modals over the main GameViewController, with "OverCurrentContext" selected.
I wanted to ask whether this pattern sounds feasible, and how others organise their SceneKit games. I'm still quite new to native iOS development, so it could be that I'm missing some basic game design pattern.
My Experience with the use of only one GameViewController (my current work for MAC OS X: i started a a 'small' 3D game with a MainMenu/start screen, a Hud and 2 or 3 complete different 3D Scenes - this shall be ported then to IOS, too):
In the last week i tried what you asked for, to use only one GameViewController for "all" that stuff - for me it seemed to be the easy and "good" way to do it - but even after lot of hours with all my tricks I've learned the last years i was not able to reload load another (or change) 3D scene (or even not another sprite kit scene hud) after a scenekit scene is loaded in a single ViewController.
Maybe there is difference between MAC OS X and IOS but i even tried this in an iOS version and it has the same behavior.
What i was able to do: You can modify a loaded 3D scene or change data in the sprite kit hud etc., so you are able to use one 3d scene to add or show the things up when they are needed but as far as my tests here showed, you will need one ViewController to show up a complete new different 3d scene or 2d/3d Menus etc. I will post my further experiences as soon as I'm a step further. i hope this helps a little.
Related
How do you know when to use a loading screen before the game starts? I'm not talking about the splash screen that shows up when you open the app. I'm talking about an actual loading screen (usually with like a loading bar) before the game starts or before the menu options show up? (Examples: Angry birds, Ultimate Briefcase, Clash of Clans) How do you know when you reach the threshold of the number of assets, audio files, etc that need a loading screen? Do you put it in the scene file? or somewhere else?
(This is in context of Xcode / Spritekit)
Sorry for all the questions. Just trying to understand and make my game better. Thanks for the help!
Answer: You shouldn't use a loading screen unless you absolutely have to. Don't use one just for the sake of using one. Use a loading screen if there is a genuine perceivable lag. To determine whether your game lags, benchmark and test your code through the worst scenarios (maximum number of sprites etc.) even if they are unlikely to occur. To understand what constitutes as a lag, the following question will be of great help:
What is the shortest perceivable application response delay?
Where and how you should load your assets is entirely up to you. You should decide that based on many factors, but generally it depends on what happens in your game and how do you handle your resources internally (when do you need resources, when do you release them from memory etc).
I remember that in Apple's Adventure example game (not available for download anymore) all of the shared resources was preloaded at the beginning of the game. Still, you don't have to do that. You can preload your resources when it is appropriate for your app, or maybe you want to release the resources while you are in the menu (or in some other scene than a gameplay scene).
There is nothing written (like in the docs or somewhere else) about when you should show loading screen, or even a rule that you must have a loading screen. The point of a loading screen is better user experience.
Personally, if you have to make a user to wait like 10 seconds before the game starts (which is rare actually), I would do two things there:
1) Show loading image (or something animated, like spinning animation)
2) Show hints or interesting facts about the game, like every 3 seconds (or whatever is an acceptable delay in this situation). This way, you introduce a player with the game while he waits, which is better than let them just wait and look at spinning animation.
I just started to learn SceneKit/SpriteKit to develop games, and while I understood the game part (the SCNScene, in my case), I’m not so sure about the menu/hud part.
What I want to do: create an Inventory Screen to show the items the player has in his bag. This screen will appear when the user taps the bag Icon in the HUD. Furthermore, the Inventory Screen must have a UICollectionView-like list to show each item.
Game Hud:
Inventory Screen:
My question is: should I mix SpriteKit with UIKit to try to accomplish this? Or use just one of them? Should everything be done just with SKScenes that are shown on top of each other (by adding to the OverlaySKScene)?
Currently, I’m presenting the HUD as a SKScene (OverlaySKScene). When the user taps the bag icon, I’m loading a new SKScene (with a bunch of SKSpriteNodes, SKShapeNodes etc) and putting it as the current OverlaySKScene. Now, I’m trying to do the CollectionView part, but don’t know if I should try to implement everything from scratch with SpriteKit or if it’s possible to reuse UICollectionView, with my SKScene as a delegate.
I'm not sure if the way I'm doing is the right way, either.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
I am building an app that has a main scene and a restart scene. The main game scene uses sprite kit physics to have an object controlled by the user float across the screen. When it rashes into an obstacle the app transitions to the end scene using:
self.presentScene.restartscene.
This works just fine. then the restart scene has a restart button. when this is clicked the app transitions back to the game scene using:
self.presentscene.gamescene
i know this presents the original scene because i did an ns log to make sure. The problem is when this original scene is presented again the scene changes colors multiple times alternates very quickly between one and two nodes on the screen and then crashes. I have no idea the cause. i have had this problem before and i know other people have. no one has given me a definite answer. i hope one of you guys will. Thank you. help needed badly!!!!!!!
Try to navigate between scenes this way:
let nextScene = GameScene(fileNamed: "SceneNameHere")!
scene?.view?.presentScene(nextScene)
Also please check your code on startup in the gamescene.
May be you are using some global flags to store value for win/fail/restart conditions and your scenes simply open together one by one (it is hard to say without checking actual code).
You need to remove the original seen from view after transitioning away from it. Use this code:
myView.removeFromParentViewController()
Hope this helps :)
I am new to the iOS platform and have written an app using Sprite Kit and Xamarin. To transition between scenes I am using NavigationController.PushViewController with a "Back" button on the new scene to return. This works fine.
My problem occurs when I go back and forth between the original scene and next scene about 3 times. The frame rate (and overall application) slows to a crawl, and depending on which scenes, will hard crash. This happens only on device and not in the simulator. My gut instinct says I'm leaking memory somewhere / not cleaning up properly, so I have just started getting up-to-speed with Instruments. Note that each scene has about 5-8 images on it.
Questions:
What is the proper way to clean-up after transitioning out of a scene back to the previous one? I am explicitly calling RemoveAllActions() and RemoveAllChildren() to ensure clean-up.
What is my best strategy when using Instruments? I've only just begun to experiment with an Allocations trace, but there are a lot of allocations and knowing what to look for is challenging.
Any help is appreciated. I am considering dumping Sprite Kit altogether since my app doesn't really need it (I wanted to experiment) and because it has been a challenge building the app with all kinds of deep crashes (e.g. SKShapeNode, which is very problematic).
Thanks.
I am trying to completely reload a gamepage in monogame - simply by touching a sprite on the page. I cannot find any solution for this.
In Android, I can call finish for the gameactivity, and then recreate a new one. How can I do that in monogame?
I am using WP8.0 SDK, monogame with XNA 4 framework.
I'm not familiar with Android development, or specifically what you mean by "gamepage", but typically this type of thing is handled with "states" in game development. You can have a playing state, paused state, Main Menu state, etc, and you just pass the game object to each state class and have it override the update/draw methods with its own information.
So, in your case, you would be in the playing state of the game, and if the sprite is touched, you might want to go back to the main title, you can pass the game object to the Title Screen State. The Title SCreen can have a call to LoadContent() which will reload all assets (effectively restarting the game completely).
Not sure if that helps. =X